


Harbor

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Belonging, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Love in a season of death, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stormtrooper Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-04 20:30:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15848799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Everyone in the Resistance makes a big deal of what the First Order takes from stormtroopers: family, home, agency, identity. Things no one's supposed to be able to take away, but it turns out to be easy, if cost-intensive: Finn's seen their accounts. In the places of these missing things, the Order set unity, belonging, order, victory: he's seen that, too, he's felt it, the throat raw with cheering, the advance in perfect formation, the pride in gleaming armor.When Finn thinks about what he's fighting for, what he's trying to get to, he can imagine things about it. Going about his day, making and eating food, meditating, sucking Poe's dick at some point, reading, sleeping—all in the knowledge that if anyone, anywhere, wanted to use someone else, treat them like a thing and not a person, they'd have to work hard and they wouldn't have help. He knows they theoretically need to do that in some particular place. But he doesn't know what the light is like there, what the air smells like, how the gravity feels.





	Harbor

**Author's Note:**

> This was hard but illuminating to write, and if it's hard to read I hope it will be illuminating, too.
> 
> Gloss and Orchis helped me write this, as they help me write everything, in fandom or out, the things they see and the things they don't, by being the writers and friends that they are.

“Programmed from birth,” General Hux was accustomed to say of the stormtroopers. Like many of the things he said, it was inflationary and inaccurate. Recruitment age was approximately three standard years. At that age, humans from most cultures were weaned, toilet-trained, able to understand verbal commands, and developing a grasp of cause-effect relationships. Recruits lacking in one or more of these areas, or with defects that would be expensive to correct, were retired after one year: led away, a massive dose of synthoscine hydrobromide in a scalp vein, a barely noticeable spike in the ship's incinerators.

Three standard years is old enough to form long-term memories, but between the formal conditioning and mindforming, the regimentation and the routine, and the new surroundings, these faded quickly.

You do not maintain a data trail if you're kidnapping children. First Order records started at age three (Recruit) and ran through age twelve (Cadet) and age sixteen (Stormtrooper), with dates of recruitment, designations, full-face and profile holos, and boxes to check for immunizations, bouts of reconditioning, sex education and contraceptive shots, performance notes for good or ill. At any point the file could be closed out with the shameful _RETIRED_ or the honorable _KILLED IN ACTION._

This was common knowledge from cadet-age onwards; troopers could see if a superior had marked them down for potential promotion or as a security risk, and maintain or change their course of action accordingly. Unlike in the decadent Republic, everything was open, nothing hidden.

This, too, was only partly true.

 

*

 

The transmission came in as a rider on a routine report, itself apparently open and innocuous. When Intel ran it through the decryption protocol, it contained some very satisfying information about troop movements, three sets of likely rendezvous coordinates, and a strand of nonsense, figures and characters from seven literary and numerical systems mixed together. They told Finn about it, because they told Finn about everything, but the Resistance had just gotten a toehold in the Siver system and all he could do was say, “Keep on it if you think it's important,” and get back to coordinating the drop of antifungal bioagent that was key to cementing relations with the Anoborite collectives.

The strand of nonsense, they reported to him several days later, decrypted to a double strand of mostly nonsense, but in the letter and number system used by the First Order, opening with the word or words _i_ _mperatormainframe_ and ending with the letters _i o u._

Finn's blood ran cold.

“You're gonna say there's no reason for thinking it's him,” he said to Poe that night, pacing across their quarters.

“I am not,” Poe protested. “Why would I say a thing like that?” He was waiting for a transmit from the Siver front, so he was fully dressed and his boots were on, but he was on their bed as far as his ankles and attempting to relax, or at least look relaxed. “If I was gonna say something, I _might_ say something like, 'What do you think will happen if you type those codes into the _Imperator's_ mainframe?' Which would be a dumb thing to ask, because I realize you have no idea.”

“No, I don't.”

“If it comes down to it with the _Imperator,_ ” Poe said, “we're not gonna be saving any mainframe.”

“I _do_ know _that._ Fuck.”

“I know you do,” Poe said, sounding embarrassed and unhappy. “Sorry.”

Finn stopped pacing and looked at him, the scowl lines, the worry lines. He got down by the side of the bed and leaned his forehead to Poe's shoulder, a weird posture that he couldn't hold for long, and suspected he wouldn't have to: “Or you could come up here,” Poe said, and Finn said, “I'm sorry too,” and got on the bed, careful to let his boots hang over the edge.

“You're pretty sure it's him, though,” Poe said after a while.

“Yeah. Mostly because I can't think of anyone else who owes me...”

“Hundreds of defectors, every team you've ever been part of and the whole planet of Kiern don't count, huh?” Finn had recently headed up an operation that rid Kiern not only of First Order occupation but of the oligarchy hopped up on rare-earth money that had invited the First Order in.

“...and would try to pay their debt with a slicing code, I was gonna say,” Finn added. “You never let me fff,” which was untrue and was also, predictably, cut off by Poe's lips. He'd deliberately spoken a little extra slowly for just that reason. He got a hand around the back of Poe's neck and they continued kissing. “Let you finish if you want to,” Poe said eventually, “anywhere you want,” and Finn laughed and shook his head, making Poe chase his mouth.

In the event, they don't have the opportunity to follow up on the code for nearly a standard year. Power in the galaxy shifts and changes, crushing another swathe of lives each time. Leia has a fatal stroke on the same day they win an important, but costly, engagement, and they bury her and recite the names of the rest of the Resistance dead, who will never be buried. They go out; they come back. It doesn't make any sense, but they keep coming back, he and Poe—they're good, sure, but no one's that good (Iolo was good, C'ai was good) so it has to be luck, and each time they touch each other like they can't believe it, because if they started to believe it, it might be taken from them.

There's no word from, and no word of, the man whom Finn saw first in a cell at Canto Bight and last on the bridge of a First Order flagship. Maybe all that double-crossing and triple-crossing finally tied his neck in a knot.

Wherever he is, Finn doesn't think of him much again until they capture the _Imperator._

Finn isn't even the one who does it—he's on Tebris, setting in motion the machinery he hadn't dared hope he'd get to use even though he'd started laying the groundwork for it not long after the code came through: housing and food and sanitation and medical care for tens of thousands of prisoners of war. There's a long blaster burn on his thigh, through his trousers: the trousers are leather and held together with metal staples, barely closing over the dressing underneath. Everything is dirty and stings, and his eyes hurt from working sleepless, but the point is, it's Vero, under the auspices of the occupying force on the _Imperator,_ who types the strands of code in.

What came up first, she explains to Finn on their holocall that night, was a map of the galaxy made of standard dates, color-coded to the names of star destroyers. When the _Vigilant_ called at Sagn. When the _Legacy_ invaded Upharasa V. A nice aggregation of data that would have otherwise had to come from the logs of several other ships, some now space debris, but the dates were all in the past and she didn't see why—

And then she typed in the second line of code and there, in the display field, other images began to float up to meet the first, images of very young children, in full face and in profile, flocking to the coincidences of time and space of which the galaxy is made.

(She doesn't tell Finn this until much later, but she started hitting the side of the machine—the very expensive, very delicate, very irreplaceable First Order mainframe containing information that doesn't exist anywhere else in the galaxy. Pounded it like a hara-tara machine in a dive bar. Vero used to be VR-0074, and she knew that if she sat there long enough and paid close enough attention, she'd see her own face go by on its way to somewhere she doesn't remember ever being.)

Finn sits down, slowly, on the low wall that once, three generations of war ago, enclosed a garden. Behind him, shell-shocked former troopers are carrying crates of First Order ration bars off a transport and into the big empty former hospital, responding to the minimal orders that he and the first wave of voluntary defectors have figured out, by trial and sometimes near-lethal error, that the POWs will respond best to. No one has a blaster. Nothing that was certain is. In a minute, in thirty seconds, someone is going to come and ask him what they should do next, and Vero is waiting. The holocall is audio only and the pickup is hypersensitive: he can hear her struggling to even out her breath.

“Put a team of four on it,” he says. “You think four?”

“Just to compile it? We should make it searchable. By designation and by star system anyway.”

She's good. It's such a relief. “Planet too, if they have it. Do they have it?”

“Some do, yeah.”

“Star system or planet. And by date. Can four people do the work?”

“Y—es,” she says. “Six would be better, if we can spare them?”

Finn thinks about it. Runs down the list of other necessities, mentally places personnel. “Split the difference. Five and they can do it half-time. Leave One-Eye and Rainy out of it, I don't want them distracted.” The two other early defectors on this particular team are trying to hammer out an ex-stormtrooper reintegration program. It's not going well.

“Half-time,” she repeats, not quite a question, not quite saying “sir.”

“I don't think this is a good time to try to move fast, Vero,” Finn says. “Everything in that display has been true for fifteen, twenty, thirty years. It can go on being true a little longer while we figure out what to do about it.”

 

*

 

The squadrons won the battle of the _Imperator_ for them, and then went screaming off again to the Farallon front, where about a third of the Order's forces are grouped. It's not the only front where the outcome is in doubt, but it is the one place where the First Order might be able to rebound spectacularly if they're allowed to stay there. So of course it's where Poe is, hitting hard and fast and then gone again: quick and dirty dogfights in the shadow of the looming, less maneuverable fleet-killers, disabling weaponry, depleting TIE fighters and pilots, cutting off deliveries. When they jump away to sleep and eat and send word, they tend to jump within the sector to save fuel. Finn pays just enough attention to the infrequent transmits to know if he needs to change anything about what he's doing, or get anyone else to, and to hear who's dead—who that he knows.

It makes a difference. Knowing the person. It's not just “their side” or “our side,” not just that a _Resistance fighter_ is dead, not just that it's going to be harder to win. It feels different when the person who ended, fireball or drifting frozen corpse, is Wopaan Nni Wopaan, just a name to him, or Mba Siruku, Finn's ride on a covert mission. She talked to her cranky old people-mover of a craft, cajoling and haranguing. Her two kids were with her parents. A third, a stepchild, had died in the early stages of fighting. “I'll see her one day,” she'd said, calm and confident, cigarra plastered with spit to the corner of her mouth, while the stars streamed by.

The First Order taught stormtroopers that they were interchangeable, replaceable. Stormtrooper deaths were a loss to the Order, that was all; enemy deaths were a gain. Finn was already questioning this when Slip's fingers trailed blood down his helmet. But before he questioned it, he _knew_ it. They all did. Unknowing it in order to know something else was slow, nonlinear: to know Mba and C'ai and Iolo and Hue and Estelle and General Organa, who have died, and Vero and One-Eye and Rainy and Jessika and Kare and Ota and Rose and Xuti, who are still alive. To know Rey. To know Poe, who is still alive, as far as Finn knows, at least until the next transmit.

It takes the team of five nearly three tendays to put together what they casually, and then officially, call the Directory. By that time, other people at the site and the other prisoner encampments in the system are calling it that too. After conferring with Elisse, the mindhealer he trusts the most, and the rest of the Directory team, they've decided to just slowly let the news leak. It doesn't make sense to try to keep it a secret, and there's no good way to tell everyone at once, the three-hundred-plus people housed here and the hundreds pouring in at the other sites. Parade-ground harangues aren't exactly his style.

He also knows—remembers, and is reminded as he circulates in the encampment, checks in with the medics and helps a few prisoners unload crates of supplies—that as much as stormtroopers learn what they're told to learn, they also learn through rumor, the dark, living, swiftly-eddying undercurrent tugging onward or pulling back against the bright, inexorable advance of the Order's official version of events. Finn and the people who listen to him, the little clump here and the few scattered elsewhere, can seed this news in conversations. They might be able to manipulate it. They can't control it. No matter what they decide, there will be people enraged and undone by that decision, people who will call them liars, people who will lie. But troopers are used to hearing things from other troopers. Maybe he's still enough of a trooper to make it count.

So he says to one of the POWs unloading with him, a burly guy still clinging to the chestplate of his armor, “The slicing team on the _Imperator_ found way to match up recruitment sites with designations. They're putting together a directory of where the Order got all of us.”

“The source worlds,” the guy says.

It's not a term he ever heard, but: “That's what it looks like,” Finn says. He stacks the crate on the dolly droid and turns to unload another.

The guy's arm lashes around his throat and tightens.

Finn fights back, but the guy is bigger than him and stronger and has had the same training, and it takes the intervention of two other people—Ota and another prisoner Finn doesn't know—to pull them apart. He pants and rubs his throat, hanging his head to get back enough breath to say, “You gotta tell me which part of it that was about.”

“I don't have to tell you shit,” the guy says. “Isn't that what you say? We don't have to do anything anymore?” Ota starts to say something, and Finn gives him a quieting look and sits on the crates. The dolly droid makes a little noise of protest, more because that's not what they're supposed to be for than because the extra weight is really a problem. “You're good,” he says. “Fast, strong. You must've been an asset to your division. I can think of a lot of reasons you might be pissed about what I just said, I just want to know which one it was.”

The guy is just staring at him now. The other prisoner, who obviously knows him and is also obviously less invested in whatever this is, says, “Pinky, can I let you go or are you just gonna try to kill him again?”

Silence, silence, and then Pinky—his broad face grayish and sweating, his hands shaking—says, “Don't let me go.”

 

*

 

Xuti's name means “little cup” in Mukta, the language her teammate Ramchandra grew up speaking. She didn't know that when she chose it. She just liked the sound. After she defected, she spent her first days out of armor listening, listening, for something that she might like to be called by.

“Are you gonna look for you?” she asks Vero on their ration break, leaning far out over the _Imperator's_ rail, balancing her midriff there. She used to fantasize, when she was stationed on the _Dominant,_ about doing a graceful flip over, falling down and down. It made her toes tingle.

Vero hesistates. “Yeah,” she says finally. “I think so.”

They've run across some designations from the VR series and one or two from the GH, but part of the problem is that the numbering doesn't bear any relation to what they're now all calling source worlds since Pinky gave them the option. _Homeworlds_ never sounded right, even in Xuti's head. Plain old _worlds_ could be anywhere. “It makes sense,” Vero said when they figured this out. “They wouldn't want recruits from the same source world assigned together. They might speak the same language, fill in each other's memories.”

“Kids that little?” said Ota, from a Republic world, and Shane, a Separatist's child, said, “You'd be surprised.” Xuti doesn't know whether she would be surprised. She's never been around children since she was a recruit herself.

“Most humans have formed some memories by the time they're three,” Elisse the mindhealer confirmed—it was a late-afternoon briefing, and half of them were recovering from food poisoning. “But we don't really know how conditioning interacts with brain development and we don't know how it plays out over time. You guys may be some of the first stormtroopers to live past forty.”

“Here for a good time, not for a long time,” Vero said, deadpan, and she and Xuti touched pinkies as they would have if they were in armor, to acknowledge a joke. It feels different when you don't have your hands covered. Pinky got his squadname by being a joker, the guy who always had his pinky out for all the applause that troopers could offer each other. He doesn't joke much now.

Codifying and correlating the data isn't terribly difficult, but it's boring and slow and there's a lot of it. Xuti and Vero, Fifties and Penelope, Ramchandra and Two-Two work well together, even though Nell and Ram are Republic-raised, and it's Ram who says, “Hey, Xuti, I don't want to spook you or anything but I think maybe I found you.”

Xuti sits very still at her console, looking at the way her fingers rest on the keys, the way the pink of her nails is set into the golden brown of her skin, the calcium deposits and the way one of them never grew back right after a careless officer mashed it in the door of a transport.

“Let me know if you want to see,” Ram says after a long pause, and moves on to the next file.

They have to disperse to their other tasks not long after. There's almost endless work to do, and Xuti often catches herself thinking that there could be a lot more difference than there is between being a trooper and being free. That she shares more with the POWs than with her Republic-raised colleagues, even the ones from the Outer Rim who didn't see much of the Republic's supposed benefits—sure, they pretty much all feel like that. But who will she be if she goes elsewhere? If she goes...home? Will she be someone, there? Is it important, to be someone? She never missed it.

 _My source world,_ she thinks. It's not like _my armor,_ or _my designation,_ or even _my division,_ though that brings it closer. This faraway thing, a notion, not a place.

 

*

 

Everyone in the Resistance makes a big deal of what the First Order takes from stormtroopers: family, home, agency, identity. Things no one's supposed to be able to take away, but it turns out to be easy, if cost-intensive: Finn's seen their accounts. In the places of these missing things, the Order set unity, belonging, order, victory: he's seen that, too, he's felt it, the throat raw with cheering, the advance in perfect formation, the pride in gleaming armor.

When Finn misses Poe, more than anything it's the simple fact of his presence. His arms ache with the absent shape and weight.

When Finn thinks about what he's fighting for, what he's trying to get to, he can imagine things about it. Going about his day, making and eating food, meditating, sucking Poe's dick at some point, reading, sleeping—all in the knowledge that if anyone, anywhere, wanted to _use_ someone else, treat them like a thing and not a person, they'd have to work hard and they wouldn't have help. He knows they theoretically need to do that in some particular place. But he doesn't know what the light is like there, what the air smells like, how the gravity feels.

Poe talks about home, when they're together. Not much, and not even necessarily as a place he wants to go back to. In comparison, if they're onplanet in a hot and wet climate, or if a sound or smell is a coincidental duplicate of one he remembers; in explanation, when a food drop from Kes contains nothing but beans and vegetable jerky, because of whatever season it is there. Finn never even knew what a season was until he joined the Resistance. The casualness, the _knowing,_ that serves Poe as a navigation mark throws off Finn's calculations, his coordinates, even though he likes Poe's longer, more rambling stories of home—not as a guide to the world, but as a guide to the teller.

The people at the camp whose numbers have come up—that's what they call it, when someone from the team has found them in the Directory, and Finn tries not to think about the time that Iolo told him “her number came up” was pilot slang for taking a fatal hit—react in such a range of ways that Finn despairs of spreading the news to the galaxy at large. What protocol could take into account Pinky's intermittent rages, Two-Nine's forward-looking cheerfulness, HH-3011's low-key sullenness, the whole nebula of possibilities within each person? Being a self meant that you weren't predictable anymore, that your reactions couldn't be counted on, even by you.

But when the battered lander settles on the weed-grown expanse at the edge of the hospital grounds, and when Poe steps out into the vegetation crisped by its heat, it turns out that Finn's reactions are exactly what he expected them to be. Love and gratitude wash through him, almost but not quite enough to knock him off his feet, just enough to sweep him forward and into Poe's arms, against Poe's mouth. Poe says, “Debrief,” and Finn says, “Later,” and Poe says, “Where can we go?”

In the little toolshed with the suspiciously clean blankets, he reaches for Poe again, hungry and unashamed. Poe meets him, messy and sliding, holding on hard. They kiss until they taste only each other, until Finn is short on oxygen and his mouth feels like someone hit him two-three days ago. Poe is pushing towards Finn with his whole self, drawing at him with lips and tongue, trying to erase the days apart, to fill the blankness and the not-knowing with irrevocable presence. To insist that they're both here, smelly and hurting and exhausted, facing each other, touching each other entire.

Poe pulls his face back a little, his arms still locked around Finn's waist and the cantilever of his spine pushing them together at the groin. Finn makes a noise in his throat. He wants to not have stopped kissing, to never stop, and he wants—

“What do you want?” Poe asks, his face alight and urgent, like the first time Finn ever said he needed him.

“I don't know. All of you. Poe.”

“Yeah, you got it. All of me, forever. Well. Not forever, that's obviously not—but like, for—for the duration—”

Finn kisses him again.

When the kiss breaks, Poe's tone is jauntier: “Which part of me you want right now?”

“That isn't what I--” Finn starts, then stops himself, because Poe's grinning. Finn would usually pick up on that; he must be running slow. Fine. “Take these off,” he says, hooking both thumbs into Poe's waistband, making up for all the time they've lost, wasted, had stolen, in so many ways, all the time that's going to start running out on them again the minute that they step outside this grimy little shed. “Put your hands on the wall.”

He eats Poe's ass until Poe's crying out for him, until the shed itself is shaking, muscle swelling and softening to his tongue. There's a taste of soap before he licks down to skin and Finn feels it like a pinch to the meat of his heart, that Poe washed in the transport's fresher before taking the lander down. Finn stands and covers him, grinds against Poe's ass and between his spit-slicked cheeks, meaning to get inside him, wanting to, and then coming hard and fast all over him, lost in it, so that for a moment Poe's arms braced against the wall are all that's holding the both of them up, like a bridge.

Finn isn't quite sure how it happens, the shift of weight and the turn, Poe repositioning them, licking Finn's stomach clean, seriously, thoroughly, then pulling Finn down to the dirt floor with him. They roll around for a while, getting adjusted, until Finn can crouch between Poe's knees and suck him and finger him till he's crying out again.

“I feel like I got the best out of that round, somehow,” Poe says, when Finn crawls up again to lie in his arms. “Make it up to you later.”

“You're here for how long?”

“Two more days till the transport comes back around.” It's circulating through the system, picking up personnel, dropping off supplies, bringing messages too sensitive for the comm channels.

“It's not even true that I want all of you. Because, because--”

“No,” Poe says. “It is. Loving you, fighting, it's all the same thing, it's what's right, it's the same. It's _how_ I love you. I don't know, I'm not making sense—”

“But then—after—” What happens after, he means, what happens if they survive.

“Maybe we won't have to think about it,” Poe says, getting it right away. “Plenty of war left.”

Later, they do debrief, which is what they call it even though neither of them is in the other's chain of command. They just need to know what they're doing. The insect larvae who live in the moss on the hospital walls are glowing softly; the air is blank and chill; they walk and talk, getting each other up to speed, and finally Poe asks about the Directory and what Finn thinks, beyond the basic fact of it, it can do for them.

Poe approves of the rumor web for informing ex-stormtroopers, and has a couple of suggestions of doubles who are well-placed to spread it in the ranks of those who haven't (yet) defected or been captured. That part's easy. But then they have to argue about whether a propaganda campaign should be directed at worlds with a high quota of stolen children—Nell wrote a program that tiptoed through even the files they haven't examined yet, counting, so they know which worlds were hardest hit—or broadcast throughout the galaxy. Whether to hide the news from the Order or let them know the information is in Resistance possession (Finn maintains they wouldn't care). Whether the POW camps need air support, and how much. Whether, and how, to make “re-homing”--it's Poe's word—troopers the First Order's responsibility in a peace treaty neither of them really believe in.

By the time they've hammered out about a third of a plan, they're genuinely frustrated with each other, feeling stuck, having walked around the hospital grounds twice. Finn's feeling the cold, and since he tends to feel it less than Poe, that probably means Poe's cold too but won't admit it.

He stops them in an alcove of dilapidated wall, physically turns Poe's body, a mirror of before. Kisses him, less from desire than as a reset, a reminder of their true state.

It works, sort of. Poe kisses him back, and then they keep walking, bending their steps toward the place where Finn sleeps. “It's kind of a one-person bed,” he apologizes, even though all the beds are.

They end up spreading the blankets out on the duracrete floor.

 

*

 

If the explicit goal of the First Order had been “everyone lives the life of a stormtrooper,” stormtroopers probably _would_ have rebelled: they believed their lives were inescapable, but only a very few believed that they were good. The promises the Order made were loud and vague and always for other people, always worth the sacrifice. Somehow, a setup that involved a lot of people killing and dying and a very few people telling them to do it was going to bring about an era of, well, order—clean and safe and prosperous, everyone's needs met and everyone in their place, for every (remaining) human in the galaxy. Just how this was to be accomplished was never explained, and it wasn't like anyone was going to ask about it.

There were places where it seemed to have been accomplished: about eighteen inhabited worlds where the First Order had received full collaboration, no invasion necessary. Of these, four were the “model” worlds they used for propaganda pictures: clear-skied, white-pavemented, sweeping black and silver architecture at least as far as the spaceport. No stormtroopers appeared in those pictures; no stormtrooper had set foot on any of those worlds, or ever would.

It's not like the goal of the Resistance is “everyone lives the life of a Resistance fighter” either. Freedom for most of them seems to come down to doing what you do when you're not fighting, without having to fight. But fighting also seems like a form of freedom. It seems so to Shane, a person without a planet, whose Festian emigrant family left them an orphan in exile; to Ota, who grew up on the seam where the Republic was fraying; and to Nell, who came to the Resistance sideways.

Penelope Igdala was born on Naboo, part of the Alderaanian diaspora settled there. Songs about “home” made her tear up, but until she joined the Resistance no one she loved had died. She joined because of her parents' and grandparents' yearly exhortations to remember Alderaan, and because of the rumors she'd heard about kidnapped babies, and because she's a good—here, they call it a “console jockey.” Best in her class at school. She'd thought they might be able to use her, and she was right.

Vero and Two-Two and Fifties and Xuti aren't babies. They have different blanknesses: Vero's deadpan, Two-Two's earnest confusion, Xuti's freeze reaction. They know what jokes are, even though Nell doesn't always get theirs, and she still cringes when she thinks of how she spoke to them at first, with a kind of mincing tenderness. What with one thing and another, they've all killed about the same number of people. Now she's standing in front of the console with one hand on the back of Xuti's chair, Xuti who asked her earlier that day, “Will you look with me?”

“Gultoltec 7,” Xuti says slowly now, her voice pinned up as high and tight as her hair.

They call it up on the holonet, and information sweeps over them. Gultoltec 7 is almost on the edge of the Midrim, surprisingly far in for a First Order press gang. It's a planet of heavy tectonic activity, lots of small continents and volcanic archipelagos scattered in wide, hot seas. Most humans live near the poles, where the climate is temperate. There's evidence of abandoned settlements in the middle latitudes; the equator is home mainly to warm-water corals and sentient cephalopods, with whom the humans have a noninterference treaty going back to before the settlements were abandoned. Xuti and Nell stare together at cities strung like wire necklaces among circumpolar seas, apparati for harnessing tidal energy and farming soft shellfish, low mounded houses that the article explains are made of a kind of land coral trained to grow around and eventually replace a frame of soft volcanic rock.

Nell wonders how much of this delicate-seeming place the First Order has allowed to survive since the article was posted. But out loud she says, “Does anything look, you know...”

Xuti shakes her head. “It's just pictures. Like any pictures, of, of anyplace.”

“Let's see what people do for work there. Does it say? Oh, you could be a seapower programmer, and the fishing nets are partway automated...” She stops, because Xuti, even though she's still sitting there, has gone away. “Hey,” Nell says weakly, tentatively, moving around to face her. She still hasn't figured out what to do when this happens.

The two of them are similar to look at, Nell and Xuti. Not like a mirror, not even like sisters, but their skin tone is the same and so is their hair, straight and thick and black and smooth. Something about the way their noses fit between their cheekbones is like a mutual echo. Nell looks at Xuti now, dark stones of eyes unfocused, and sees someone as alien to her as any nonhumanoid sentient. She says, “You wanna take a break? Let's take a break.”

The Resistance transport orbiting Tebris now is due to call at the Gultoltec System: 8 also has humanoid inhabitants, and 4 has methane ice that they can use as a fuel trade. If the six troopers kidnapped from there twenty-two years ago want to return, they can ride along, even though it's too soon, even though technically four of them are still prisoners of war, even though by no stretch of the imagination could the manner of their return be described as a plan.

“It's Resistance,” Xuti says to the extinguished holoscreen. “It's a Resistance world?” She makes it a question. “Because of us?” Nell knows that Xuti has never met any of the other troopers from Gultoltec. Until recently, they _weren't_ from Gultoltec. They were just stormtroopers, and then two of them were defectors, and the rest of them were prisoners. You might as well say they were “from” Tebris, “from” the camp. At least they'd all actually been there.

 

*

 

The day before Poe leaves, they're arguing again. “We can spare them.”

“I don't agree. And if you could, I'd want you to send them to the Midrim. The Order's not going to fight to get these soldiers back and I'd be surprised if they'd bother to take them out. They know we're not going to kill prisoners wholesale and we can't afford to let them go. They're probably delighted that we've got resources tied up here.”

“I just think once the leak is really out, they'll want to take out that data.”

“It's the same thing,” Finn says patiently, or what he hopes is patiently. “The data makes more problems for us than it ever did for them, because we have to decide what to do about it and we have to _do_ the things we decide to do about it. Or some of them. And then we have to deal with whatever happens from that. I should've known that fucking slicer wouldn't have done me an actual _favor._ ” Okay, maybe patience isn't the word for it.

But surely that wasn't enough to make Poe look as shaken and defeated as he does. “What,” Finn says, even though he wants to say, “Sorry.”

“It's just.” Poe stops and breathes. “I know it's good that you can think like them,” he says. “It's good for us, it's good for the fight, it's part of why we've lasted as long as we have. It's just hard. To hear.”

Finn stares at him and stares at him and uses every muscle to keep himself from driving a fist into the wall.

“Finn,” Poe says. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I should've kept that to—I'm sorry.”

“To yourself,” Finn says. “Yeah.”

“I know how much you're doing. Finn, please. Whatever you think or whatever you don't think, what you're _doing_ is treating them like people. Because they are people.”

“It doesn't go away,” Finn says. “That's what you don't get. It doesn't ever, ever, ever go away. I wish it would. I know you're not trying to send air support here just to keep me safe, because, like, you wouldn't do that. But that wouldn't be an argument for me anyway. It wouldn't be an argument for any of us about ourselves. It _might_ be an argument for us about each other. That's what I'm fighting for. I'm not saying we're disposable. I'm saying the Order sees us that way and the reason I know I can trust it is because I feel it.”

“Finn—”

“Don't tell me I matter to you,” Finn says, forcing the words out. “Please don't.”

The door swings inward, just a touch. Finn's hand goes to his blaster, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Poe's doing the same.

“Sorry,” Shane says, taking in their poses and their faces. “The transport just hailed us and said they'll be in position for the next hour, so anyone who's going should get going.”

The lander carries eight. Zap, Double-Ones, Emen and Daoud are going along to Gultoltec 7, where—apparently--they were born. Vero's going with them to run interference. Xuti and Sedna are staying behind.

Shane backs out of the room, leaving Finn and Poe to look at each other again.

Poe stands from the broad windowsill where he was perching and crosses until there's two more steps between them. “I want to kiss you. But it's your call.”

“Before you go,” Finn says, rubbing it in.

“All the time,” Poe says.

Shane has to come in again to tell them that no, really, the transport is only going to maintain position for another half an hour and it takes a good 20 minutes to get up there and everyone else who's going is aboard.

Finn kisses him one more fierce time, but he doesn't follow Poe out or watch the lander take off. They both need to get back to work.

 

*

 

The Battle of Farallon is a Resistance victory only in the sense that it forces a First Order retreat. Resistance losses are heavy, and they need to maintain a presence until the enemy ships get far enough away that it would be unlikely for them to pull a go-out-and-come-in-again. The fighter pilots are wrung out, living on stims, spread too thin among the wreckage of their fellow fighters' crafts; one ship less and they wouldn't have been able to hold the sector. But it's theirs, which means that it has a chance of belonging again to the people who actually live there.

Finn heard about this when he was packing for the Midrim, where the _Takodana Belle_ insisted that they needed him onsite and onboard, without the comms lag. He's pretty sure armies aren't supposed to work like that, but the Resistance has always been part military, part cult of personality, part what Poe calls “family.” He thinks of Hux on the bridge, Kylo Ren behelmeted and cloaked, troopers touching pinkies or bumping shoulders in their supposedly soulless ranks: maybe this is how all armies are, however they're supposed to work.

When Finn was filling his duffel to leave, Ramchandra approached him and silently held out a thumbdrive. “What's this?” Finn asked, although he kind of knew.

“Directory,” Ram said. “Copy. Besh version.” He looks the way they all look. Another corvette took his sister's in tow after Farallon, and she's in bacta on Kural; that was in the transmit, too. Precious signals, worth the extra time and risk of interception: the Resistance insists it's important to know what happened to the living and the dead.

“You want me to do something with it?”

“Not unless you have to,” Ram said. “I told you, it's besh version, so some of the search functions don't work great and we still haven't stripped out all the garbage. But it's best practices to have data in more than one place. Vero has one too.” Vero and the rest of them on Gultoltec 7 are keeping comms dark for now, after a long and exhausting wrangle about the best course. She'd said, the same even way she said most things, “If things go really wrong, you won't be able to get there in time. And if things go really right, we won't want anyone to know for a while yet.” She was right, but Finn still hated the knowing and not knowing, which only got harder the more people he had to know and not know about.

He duly gives his input on a series of decisions, but he can't tell if they make a real difference to the campaign. He sleeps on a cot in the situation room, taking his turn undercooking or burning the dinnerboxes and monitoring the comms, and the main thing that comes home to him is how tired he's been, and for how long.

He's been there a few days when he learns that the First Order has blasted the POW camp on Tebris into slag.

The situation room grays out and spins around him.

He's kneeling on the floor, saying their names or their numbers, all the ones he knew, so many that he didn't know. _Rainy, 4773, One-Eye, Pinky, GC-3219, Twelve-Ten, Parallel._ People are touching him, he thinks. People are arguing somewhere behind his left shoulder, he thinks, hissed voices and tense pauses. He runs out of numbers and names. Some helps him to his feet, he goes, to his cot, he goes, sits there, doesn't know why it's different, doesn't know why he should be anywhere in particular. He traces the letters and numbers into his palm, where the letters and numbers of stormtroopers go.

Later, trying to warm his hands, he puts one in his pocket and touches the thumbdrive. _Ramchandra,_ he thinks, _Penelope, Shane, Otamragan._ He leaves it where it is.

Later still, in the corridor, nearing the incinerator shaft, he touches it again.

Finn knows the stories: not just BB-8's heroic (so he claims) trundle across the desert, but the Rogue One team and the nameless Bothans who died to bring intelligence of the second Death Star. All these tales of data's last stand, its precious retrieval, the worth of its weight in sentients. The people at the camp died for this information, but their deaths didn't preserve it or transmit it. Their deaths didn't do anything for anyone except end their lives.

The incinerator shaft is three, four steps away. Finn pauses in front of it, a long pause. Then he walks past it. About halfway to the situation room he throws up, and while he's still leaning and panting against the durasteel wall, a mouse droid comes rolling up, scolding. It sprays something from its underside that dehydrates the vomit to powder, then sucks the powder up.

He sits in the situation room. When people ask him questions, he answers them. He's there when the cipher message comes in from Vero on Gultoltec 7: _Majority population here ready to take FO apart with hand tools and teeth please advise._ He's there when Poe rounds the corner on a skid and lets momentum carry him to just short of Finn's space.

“Poe.”

“I thought you were there.”

“I wasn't.”

“Yeah,” Poe says, and pulls him in. Finn knows he's supposed to hold on. He holds on.

No one on the _Takodana Belle_ has quarters of their own. They go to the cargo hold—to talk, to be close, Finn isn't sure what Poe's imagining or expecting. He touches the thumbdrive in his pocket, it's become a tic now, and Poe says, “Whatcha got?”

“The Directory.”

“No shit,” Poe says, and there's a long pause. “How you gonna use it?”

“Not sure yet.” He explains about the comm from Vero. “So it might be time to do—something—but.” He breathes in, slowly. “I can't seem to think,” he explains.

“Sure, I get it.” And Finn knows he does. Knows he gets it better than Finn does himself, maybe. “What if—uhh—let me think. Broadcast it. By planet.”

“Not by system?” It's an automatic question, but knowing to ask it and having Poe be the one he's asking makes Finn feel slightly—something. “Better” is probably too strong.

Poe reflects, visibly, scrunching up his face. “Too chancy, too much potential for intra-system hostility to mess it up. By planet, and highlight--” He stops, and says in a slightly different voice, “You know who was there?”

“Some of them. Some I knew by their squadnames or their new names, not by designation, and I didn't know everyone, we weren't exactly keeping records, but yeah, some of the numbers I know.” They're in his palm now, everyone he can remember. “Highlight them,” he says. “You were saying.” He can feel the edge of what Poe is thinking, but can't quite get there.

“Yeah. Highlight them in, I don't know, in red, and then add text across the bottom in Basic and whatever planetary language. 'Killed before they could return home.'”

The trick of it is obvious to Finn, but distant: it wouldn't work on him, but he can see how it might work. He thinks about all the things he could say: that it wasn't home for most of them, that some of them weren't sure they wanted to go ( _Xuti,_ he thinks,  _Sedna_ ) and others had no intention of returning, that some of the people who died still didn't know where they'd been stolen from.

“Search the numbers,” Finn says instead, “then cross-reference by planet, then highlight the numbers, then add the text.”

“Right. Then get the signals out. We might already have agents in some of the systems, that'll help.”

“I can't do it.” He almost throws up again, admitting it, but he cannot run down that list looking for the designations of the dead.

“Put whatever you remember on a datapad for me. I'll put a team together for the rest.”

“Don't you have to fly?”

“No,” Poe says. “I have to be here.”

 

*

 

The signals travel. Some worlds don't react at all; some have been long since depopulated or been made uninhabitable by the First Order. One or two were already in the fight. And a few, following Gultoltec 7, mobilize. Some are attacked, then, by neighbors afraid that they'll draw down First Order vengeance or are making a bid for dominance. Some bring their neighbors into the fight as well. But the most important point, as far as the Resistance is concerned, is that they're widely distributed. In its depredations, the Order was eager to divide and conquer. Now, there are more fronts to fight on, and their forces are thinning out in more ways than one.

The star-map shifts and shifts again, calling for all Finn's attention. At night, when he can't sleep, he forces his mind toward the numbers he couldn't make himself remember, the people that the search function wasn't adequate to finding, the glitches, the disappearances.

He's pretty sure that Poe and the rest of them were hoping for a greater ignition and flare, more source worlds alight with righteous rage, a sharp rise in trooper defections as they learned what happened to their fallen fellows or saw, bright on a screen, their own designations opposite the names of the places they were stolen from. There's a little of that: a platoon here, a squad there, one whole mutiny on a transport and a change of course toward the source world Vishkenezh Major. But not a lot. Not enough to be the only thing they need to turn the tide.

“I haven't explained it well enough,” he says wearily to Poe when they're trying to settle in for sleep. Poe would never _say_ he's disappointed with their gambit; the most Finn gets from him is frustration, or bewilderment, and he keeps it under wraps. Poe under wraps, Poe being cautious with him, is a terrible thing to see, to feel, even as he's grateful for it. He _wants_ to come back to him. He wants to say, “I want to come back to you.” He wants to ask for time, but time is what Poe's been giving him, and it feels awful.

Now, as almost always these days, Poe takes a minute before he responds; the pause is like an engine revving, chafing in place. “You've explained it fine. I think it really is something I just don't get, just like you don't get the 'home' thing. Like, I get it but I don't _get_ it. It's always going to be a little bit of a surprise to me, like for a second, before I remember.”

“I can't even say I was wrong,” Finn says, as he's said several times now. “You needed every one of those ships at Farallon. I can't think of any single thing I could've done differently. That's what feels the worst.”

“Like the D'Qar evacuation,” Poe says, which _isn't_ something that he's said before.

Finn turns to look at him, fully look. That's years back, now. But of course that doesn't matter. Years from today, whether or not Finn's alive himself, and whatever responsibility truly lies at his door, the number of people whose deaths followed on this decision of his will be the same. If he lives long enough, maybe he'll be able to think about how they became real to him when he learned of their deaths. Maybe.

“How did you--” he starts to ask, but gets stuck.

“Dunno,” Poe says, traveling with him—not completely, never completely, but a good part of the way. “I mean, for one thing, especially when they started picking off our fleet, I didn't think I'd have to live with it all that long. And I guess I still might not.”

“Is that, uh. Is it.”

“Comforting?”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes.”

They've never really talked before this, Finn thinks, or at least, this is the most they've ever said. “To me too,” he says. “But I also—I don't want—I mean, I want—”

He reaches for Poe, in a way he hasn't since he came onboard. Draws him close and feels him, smells him, weighs against him, the specificity of Poe making its way across the gap between them. They fall together for the kind of love that you might say was like war, if you'd never fought in a war: driving toward, into, _beyond_ each other and yet still ending up side by side, each with the living reality of the other clasped in his arms.

 

*

 

“You _sure_ you can come with,” Poe says, for the third time.

Finn turns from the three datapads ranged on his work surface, a chipboard-and-rope shelf rigged at standing height. There's plenty on all of them, but nothing on any of them to make him change his mind. “Yeah, I'm sure.”

“I know it doesn't mean to you what it does to me.”

“It doesn't,” Finn agrees. “But you do.”

He gets a quick, bright, startled look for that, followed by a kiss with a lot of tongue. “I guess get ready, then,” Poe says, after they disentangle somewhat.

Finn waves at the duffel on their bed. “I am ready. I already told you I was going.” For that, and with even less reason, except the reason that's always there, Poe kisses him again.

On the way into the hangar, Finn drops a noogie on BB-8's carapace and is rewarded with a rude, but gentle, blatting sound. The little droid has a particular task to do on this trip, and he's even more full of himself than usual: when they reach the asteroid field and Poe cuts the propulsion, he's the one who extends a pincer attachment and delicately plucks a gray-black fragment about the size of Finn's hand.

“This was a _planet,”_ Finn says, hearing the hush and the incredulity in his own voice.

“Yeah,” Poe says. “This was Alderaan.”

Their next stop is almost equally shocking to Finn in its very—“Planetiness?” Poe suggests. “Planetude?” A whole ecosystem, scarred by war and occupation, beginning to reconfigure itself: mosses adding a yellow-green fuzz to trampled ground, strangler figs draping themselves shyly over abandoned loaders and the remains of prefab huts and reaching for the moss-filmed soil, bugs beginning to nest in the crotches and crevices of the strangler figs, people swatting at the bugs as they go about their work. Finn remembers this planet, remembers burying General Organa here: the moss was blue-green then, they had to dig through it.

Poe takes a few steps ahead of Finn and balances the asteroid fragment on the pane of transparisteel they used as a marker. He stands with his head low, hands cupped as if to offer something; a breeze breaks the mugginess and stirs his hair at the crown. The line of his back and shoulders is like a line of code that Finn will spend the rest of his life, however long that is, learning to decipher and reread.

Not long ago, he'd sat with Vero on the bridge of the _Bariflor,_ one of the source world tour ships—the real ones, not the scams—because he and Poe had Resistance business on Wangere, its third destination, and he'd wanted to see Vero again. She'd learned where she was born, she told him, but still hadn't gone there. “One day,” she said. “Or not.”

She spread one palm and with her other hand traced the dead into it. “You have a copy, too." Technically, everybody has a copy--the Directory is public on the holonet and is strangely, almost suspiciously sliceproof--but making sure that people actually have access to it is part of what she's working on. "You ever look for you? Your 'home'?” Her voice gave it the twist that most ex-troopers did give the word, to the point where it was almost like the vowel sound was changing. Soon, maybe, it would be its own word, _their_ own word, with its own meaning. He made a mental note to tell Poe about that. To Vero, he just shook his head.

“No?”

“At first I didn't want to,” Finn said, “and now I don't have to.”

Vero followed his eyes to where Poe was nerding out with the _Bariflor'_ s skipper about fuel conservation methods on the Abergefell run. “Huh,” she said. “I wouldn't have thought of that.”

“Me either,” Finn said, “before. But it makes about as much sense as everything else they say about it.”

Vero grinned then, and touched his pinky with her own.

 

 


End file.
